I spent two months working in the Youngstown office of a major website (of whose name I will not disclose for fear of being Silly Putty’d to my car by a rather quirky editor) before being fired for my refusal to write articles on things that the publication higher-ups deemed “newsworthy” and “socially relevant” (whatever the fuck that means) but that I found to just be pure dumpster squash.
I was not particularly angry or upset when this happened – not until I realized that I would no longer be able to afford the campground space I’d been sleeping on under the beautiful, smogged-out Youngstown sky. That’s when I became straight peeved.
So on my last day before leaving my job once and for all at the major website, I did what I knew would hurt the major website the most – I destroyed their listicle machine. Yes, believe it or not, in this modern day and age we live in, every major generic pop spam news website invests in a listicle machine soon after getting their basic operations off the ground. These machines quickly become the primary source of content creation for the website and can produce up to 100,148,102 shitty listicles a day. This keeps readers busy and spam detectors even busier.
When I destroyed the listicle machine at the major generic website I had been fired from, I did it the only way I could think of – I fed it factual information. The machine, as massive and powerful as it was, had only been designed to take in downright nonsensical bullshit info. By feeding it some of the real stuff (or at least relatively close to it) I caused the great machine to short-circuit, split in half, and collapse into tiny little pieces.
I’m not saying I’m a vigilante; I think it’s obvious that I am.
